


The Woman Who Walks the Shore

by spookysu



Category: Original Work
Genre: Cryptids, F/M, Horror, Inktober, Inktober 2017, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, Monster Girls, Monsters, Ogres, Oni, Port Townsend, Prostitution, Sex Work, The Port universe, Urban Fantasy, Washington
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-08
Updated: 2017-10-08
Packaged: 2019-01-10 21:22:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12308046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spookysu/pseuds/spookysu
Summary: A fisherman encounters a mysterious, horned woman on the Washington coast, and she gives him an offer he can’t refuse. Commission forZeroInvadorfor theInktoberprompt Mysterious.The Portuniverse.





	The Woman Who Walks the Shore

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ZeroInvador](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZeroInvador/gifts).



It had been years since Joshua had been back home in Port Townsend, Washington, yet somehow, everything felt the same. The same dreary drizzle hung in the air like a wet blanket, the same coffeeshops nestled between ornate Victorian buildings, the same mysterious, inhuman laughter rang in the distance.

The ship boys seemed nervous once they approached the dock. Perhaps they weren’t used to a cryptid mecca like Port Townsend, Joshua wasn’t sure. But he was determined to keep them safe. It was what good Christian men like himself did.

“There any strip clubs ‘round here, mate? Wanna see some titties,” Lucas, a shipmate, asked Joshua. He was a scrawny, geeky looking sort, with wispy hairs on his face as his barely-pubescent-looking self attempted growing a beard.

“Nah. Port Townsend is too old-fashioned for that. It’s got some good bars, though. There’s a tavern run by ogres down the coast a little ways.”

Lucas blanched. “They’re allowed to do that here?”

Joshua slugged him in the shoulder and rolled his eyes. “Port Townsend is overrun with cryptids. It’s hard to find a business ‘round here not run by monsters.”

Lucas stuffed his hands in his worn-out ski jacket’s pockets and pulled out two cigarettes. “A smoke for the walk?”

Joshua took one and looked behind him for the rest of his crew. In the mist on the coast, it was hard to see even an inch before his face, so he couldn’t see anyone around him but Lucas.

“Jack? Travis? Tucker? Horace?” Joshua called out to the other men living on his ship as he lit his cigarette.

There was no answer.

Joshua sighed and took a drag. Perhaps they got distracted by the local nightlife.

“D’you know where the other men went?” Joshua asked Lucas.

Lucas gave a halfhearted shrug. “Beats me. They’re always slow.”

Joshua nodded in agreement, but the hairs on the back of his neck still stood on end. Something felt very, very wrong, but he couldn’t quite place what it was.

Lucas and Joshua walked up the shore in silence, in search of the ogre bar Joshua had mentioned earlier. The sky continued to grow darker. Rain tumbled from the sky, feeling like icy needles on the bits of skin Joshua had revealed to the elements.

“I can’t see shit,” Lucas said, flicking his lighter to try to make some light.

Joshua turned toward the light, but couldn’t see much aside from a hazy orange ball that was the flame. “This storm seems pretty rough. We should be at the bar soon.” Joshua couldn’t help but wonder if his other shipmates were okay and where they ended up. Did they find a hotel? Did they want to stay the night in their bunks?

Did they get dragged to sea by some sirens?

Joshua shook the thought from his head. They had all been living at sea for the last five years, and none of them had died yet. The likelihood that his coworkers had been drowned as soon as they reached the Port was rather slim. Besides, they were all huge men. He was sure they could punch any sirens they encountered easily.

Something with sharp nails tapped his shoulder, and Joshua jumped, dropping his cigarette into the wet sand with a hiss.

A woman’s voice laughed. “Clumsy,” she said with a strange accent.

Joshua picked up his cigarette and turned to the speaker.

He gasped slightly.

An ogre!

She was holding an old flip phone with cutesy charms dangling from them and a flashlight, and the light provided made her rather visible in the fog. She was about average height, not including her wild, wavy black hair. The sides of her head were shaved, giving room for her forward-curling horns, which made her look like more of a demon. She wore heavy black makeup, reminiscent of Joshua’s goth phase in middle school, and a black raincoat. He couldn’t help but wonder if there was something interesting beneath the coat, and he resisted the urge to unzip it.

Joshua decided to stop focusing on her dramatic platform combat boots and on her face. She was very obviously Asian, which was where ogres were rumored to have originated. Was that why her accent was weird? Was she an immigrant? Her face was also decorated in piercings—two below her lip, one in the middle of her lip, two above her top lip, a ring in the middle of her nose, and two on her right eyebrow.

“Who are you?” Joshua asked finally.

She looked at the sky for a moment, as if English would fall with the rain. “I am called Tora,” she said carefully.

Joshua concluded she had a Japanese accent, but it had a strange lilt to it. He knew that ogres had their own language, but he had never heard it spoken before. Perhaps she spoke Japanese and their language?

“Are you lost?” Joshua asked. Human or not, he always wanted to be a gentleman to strange ladies he found on the beach.

Tora shook her head, giving him a rather toothy grin. Her fangs were awfully intimidating, longer than the ones of any ogre he had ever seen. They almost touched the black studs below her lip. “You seem lost,” she said finally, pronouncing her l like an r. “You can come to my place? It’s dry.” She giggled, an intimidating, low sound, as she stepped closer. “I’m not.”

“Uh,” Joshua said, his cheeks flushing. So Tora was a prostitute? He turned to find Lucas so he could see if he could get his best friend in on the action—what men got the opportunity to fuck an ogre, after all?—but he was nowhere to be seen. “Lucas!” he called out.

“He won’t answer,” Tora said, closing her flip phone and slipping it into her pocket. The charms still hung outside of the pocket. They looked like they were from some sort of anime—something Joshua liked in his youth—but he couldn’t place from where.

“Why not?” Lucas asked.

“He is at the bar,” Tora said slowly, averting her eyes and gesturing behind them.

Joshua grimaced. They had been wandering the beach and went past the bar! “I guess I am kinda lost, then,” he said with a laugh.

“All of your kind are.” She said this with more assurance, as if she had said it many times before. She brushed her hand against his cheek, tangling her pointed, black nails in his full beard. “Human men. So confused. So much desire. So much missing.”

Was Tora high? He didn’t understand anything she was trying to say. Perhaps it was a language barrier? English was pretty hard. Joshua had fucked enough foreign girls to understand that.

A thought of fucking Tora crossed his mind, stripping her of her raincoat to find nothing on underneath, tackling her to the sand, and making her scream as he plunged into her, holding her by the hair and horns. It send a shaking, burning arousal within him, something he wasn’t used to feeling with any other women.

“You come to my place?” she asked again, her voice lower this time. With her other hand, she unzipped that long raincoat, revealing ample cleavage.

Joshua swallowed. “How much do you charge?”

Tora grinned and chuckled. “Thousand an hour.”

A thousand! Was she fucking with him? There was a legend—or a rumor, Joshua wasn’t sure which—that ogres were incapable of lying, and he wasn’t sure if that applied to jokes, too. Could ogres be sarcastic?

“Are you serious?” Joshua decided to dare to ask.

Tora crossed her arms, pushing her tits up a bit. “You pay for what you get. You can find cheaper girl for cheaper sex.”

Joshua decided that Tora did have a point. A thousand an hour to fuck a rather intoxicating ogre girl? “Okay,” he decided. Seeing that she wasn’t human—after all, another rumor had it that ogres went rather wild—he decided to dare ask, “Do you have any coke?”

She laughed. “Don’t be stupid.” Then she grabbed him by the hand and led the way.

In the back of his mind, Joshua hoped that his crewmates were okay, but he was too focused on Tora to give it too much of a thought.

 

\--

Tora lived in a fucking mansion.

Joshua remembered this mansion from when he was a kid. He would ride his skateboard with his friends over by it, since the Port Townsend natives knew that the mansion was a cryptid itself. It had its own soul, constantly expanding and killing some that enter it. Some kids liked to throw rocks at it to see how it reacted, but the mansion used a tree on its property to collapse on top of the children, and nobody touched it ever since.

The mansion didn’t kill Joshua, though, and he figured that Tora had something to do with it. Or maybe the fact that he didn’t have any rocks.

They went a spiral staircase, their wet boots squeaking on the ancient wood.

Tora put a finger over her lips, covering the two gems in the middle of her lips. “Youkai are sleeping,” she said quietly.

Joshua tried to walk quieter. He wondered who else lived inside the living mansion.

Tora squeezed the handle to her door and turned it. Joshua took a second to read the sign on the door: “Tora’s Zone: Do Not Enter Unless You Want To Be Eaten Alive.” He swallowed. He could see there was some font beneath it, but it was in a language he didn’t recognize. Perhaps that was what the ogres spoke.

“What do you mean by eaten alive?”

Tora shed her raincoat, revealing a black leather corset and matching skirt, and fishnet thigh-highs under her combat boots. She unhooked her boots, becoming even shorter than before, and Joshua found himself realizing how muscular she was. She looked like a warrior. He knew that ogres had superior strength, but he never realized how easily one could kill him.

Maybe he should’ve worried about his crewmates a little more.

“Take off shoes,” Tora ordered.

Joshua obliged and hung his coat next to hers.

“Pay first.” She reached into a panel in the floor—the floor was odd and felt like bamboo, like the floors of the Japanese whorehouses he had been in during his travels—and pulled out an iPad.

“Square?” he asked.

Tora chewed her center lip piercing. “Something like that.”

The language was all something Joshua didn’t recognize, so Tora switched it to English. The text at the top of the page read “OniPay—The Most Secure Way To Make Money On The Deepweb!”

“I don’t have bitcoin,” Joshua said.

She waved him off. “Credit is fine. Swipe your card here and it will charge you during your stay here. It will stop when we are done.” She gave him a polite smile.

He swiped. There was no going back now.

She put away the iPad and walked over to the closet, pulling out a towel. “Shower first. Do you have protection?”

He shook his head. He didn’t remember the last time he had used protection. For an ogre, Tora seemed rather anal, but he supposed she was running a business.

She rolled her eyes. “So stupid. I have condoms. They are oni made and don’t break.”

“Oni?”

She rolled her eyes further. “My people. Oni.”

So that’s what they called themselves! “Oni,” he said.

She nodded. “Now shower. Across the hall.” She pointed.

He followed her directions, trying to shower sea grime off of him as quickly as he could. This bathroom seemed to have her business in mind; there were plenty of razors, tooth brushes, mouthwash, and tiny bottles of sake—oni-brew, of course—in a cute gift basket.

Why not? He decided to take the time to shave his junk. She did seem rather fussy, after all.

When he was through, he wrapped a towel around his waist and went back into the room. She was sitting on her bed, crossed-legged, smoking a rather long cigarette.

But it wasn’t a cigarette. Joshua could recognize that flowery smell anywhere.

Opium.

So that was her drug of choice!

He had been to an opium den once before, in Japan, but it wasn’t his thing. The sweetness was too nauseating for him. He preferred uppers, like coke.

She gave him a hungry look. “I give half price for your blood.”

“My _what?_ ”

She stood, blowing out her pipe. “Blood, stupid! I put it in sake.”

He blanched. “You’re a vampire?”

“Yes. And oni.”

“Okay. How much do you need?”

“As much as I decide.”

He removed his towel and kneeled before her, allowing her to press tiny kisses along his veins in his neck. Without warning, she sunk those intimidating fangs in, going through his skin easily, like butter.

Somehow, it didn’t hurt. There was a dull ache, but nothing worse than getting a shot. It made him dizzy, though, and painfully aroused. He wanted her, needed her, and didn’t need this fucking around. His hands shook as he tried to find a spot on her body to rest his hands. He felt confused, drugged, sleepy.

She pulled away suddenly, licking her lips, narrow eyes deep in thought.

“You’re a rapist,” she said suddenly.

He blanched. What was she talking about? The prostitutes in Japan? They hardly counted! They were prostitutes! He could do what he wanted once he paid!

“Blood has memories.” She slapped him, then, hard enough to send him onto her weird floor. “I feed from you men, I know who you are. It’s a test. If you’re a good man, we fuck. If not, I kill you.”

“I don’t know what you mean!” he cried out.

She stepped on his back, knocking the wind out of him. “Saomi? The Takamura twins?”

She somehow knew the names of those prostitutes in Japan he had taken!

“But they’re just…”

“Just prostitutes?” She gave him a cruel smile. “We are women. We are people running businesses. And besides.” She licked her lips in thought. “What about Karen? She was the first. High school. She was drunk.”

“That was a mistake. I apologized.”

“Apologies don’t fix anything!” she shrieked, giving him a sharp kick in the ribs. He felt them crack and cave into his lung, and he wheezed. “She had to live with what you did for the rest of her life. You monster!” Another kick. “And what about Louise?”

Louise. He had tried to forget about her. But no amount of drinks, no lines of coke would get his ex-wife out of his mind.

“You abused and raped your wife. I am glad she is safe now. Safe from viruses like you.” Her voice shook, accent thick with rage. She kicked him in the other side and flipped his breaking body over. “I was going to give you a chance, but you ruined it when you decided to ruin innocent women. You monster.”

“You’re a monster,” he said.

And it was the last thing he ever spoke.

“No one calls me monster,” she hissed. She lifted him with her hands and pulled his body apart with a scream, sending his blood and innards flying to the walls, painting the peaceful room with red. With a slash of her nails, she decapitated him, letting the man’s head roll on her floor.

She licked her fingers clean and grabbed her iPad. Switching the language to Oni, she selected “drain account” in the settings field.

Ten grand was instantly transported to her account. Tora sure loved technology. Perhaps she would buy herself some new shoes. Or fly out to Japan for a few days to pay respects to her old friends.

“All in a night’s work,” Tora said to herself, in Oni. Then she clapped her hands twice, and the living mansion dissolved any part of the man she killed—his clothes, his blood, his head, leaving behind a single incisor.

She put it in a box full of men’s teeth she collected, a sign that she was doing the world a service.

“One man at a time, and there will be no abuse left in the world,” Tora said to herself.

And she went back to her opium. She turned on Netflix on her iPad and watched some old Japanese horror movies as she drifted off to sleep.


End file.
